The present invention relates to a method for administrating answer mail obtained when mail requiring an answer is sent in a so-called electronic mail system in which communication sentences are exchanged between terminal units and a personal computer using a computer system.
In order to transmit information more smoothly or in order to prevent a user from temporarily interrupting the work due to information transmission as in the information transmission using telephone, electronic mail systems begin to be popularized. In such an electronic mail system, information of characters or voice is exchanged between terminals such as personal computers, telex or word processors via a computer network.
In those systems, a user can look at the list of mails delivered to the user. In some systems, the user can see the delivery situation of the mail sent by that user. Here the delivery situation means information representing whether the mail sent by the user has reached the destination or not, and whether the other party has read the mail or not.
The list display and the delivery situation display advantageously makes it possible to know the whole situation at a look to rapidly acquire important information or positively transmit important information. In case of the mail requesting an answer, however, it can be judged only by looking at the contents whether an answer is requested or not. In a system disclosed in JP-A-58-3445, for example, therefore, it is possible to display a list of the mail requesting answers together with the mail delivered to the user.
However, the above described prior art poses the following problems.
When the method of displaying the list of the mail requesting answers is used, the user who sends the mail requesting an answer can ask for an answer only by purposely making mail for asking for an answer and sending it or by telephoning. Therefore, there is a possibility that important information cannot be transmitted when the person who received the mail requesting an answer is absent or the person who sent the mail forgets to ask for an answer owing to pressure of work. In such a case, the person who received the mail requesting an answer cannot judge how important the answer is for the person who sent the mail requesting the answer because the answer is not asked for.
The prior art thus has a problem that it is impossible to prevent an incident that the person forgets to ask for an answer and hence the transmission of important information is delayed.
Further, the following technique is disclosed in JP-A-57-192153. At each of terminal units installed at a plurality of branch offices, the operator of the terminal unit writes the amount sold as a message at fixed time every day toward the mailbox of the host computer. The operator of a terminal unit installed at the head office reads out messages of respective branch offices from the mailbox and grasps the amount sold of the entire company. In accordance with function of such a system provided in consideration of a possibility that the message might not be written at fixed time, the situation of message writing completion at terminals commanded to write messages to the mailbox is examined, and an answer asking message prepared beforehand is automatically sent to a terminal where the writing operation has not yet performed.
This technique aims at examining whether a message has been written or not from a terminal specified beforehand. Accordingly, it was impossible to administrate information concerning whether the answer mail has reached or not when a plurality of mails having answer terms which are different each other are sent, and automatically ask for an answer provided that the answer has not reached yet.